EDMONTON – The Citadel Theatre sent the Journal’s entertainment editor a letter demanding drama critic Keith Ashwell be “reassigned,” touching off several days of drama in the public arena.

The theatre’s general manager, Wayne Fipke, criticized Ashwell for ignoring the biggest theatre in town “despite our newsworthiness.” He also charged the critic with denigrating “our previous productions and accomplishments” and “condemn(ing) out of hand our future productions and artistic growth.”

As a result, Fipke wrote, he had to “endorse” the decision of his theatre’s publicity and public relations representatives, striking Ashwell from the Citadel’s media ticket list.

Fipke noted the Journal is free to “print whatever it desires … Its freedom of speech is not being questioned.” However, the Citadel must question “the integrity and fair-mindedness of one reporter whose recent despotic behaviour is so blatant as to be ridiculous.”

In his reply, Journal editor Stephen Hume said he had “no intention of reassigning (Ashwell). His integrity as a critic is not in question.

“When the editor of the Journal seeks advice on which critic will review plays in Edmonton, the last person he will seek it from is the manager of the Citadel Theatre. Mr. Fipke many protest that his intentions are otherwise, but Citadel management’s obvious intention is to intimidate and silence a critic whose voice they have found irritating.”

Hume noted the Journal had not ignored the theatre, having mentioned Citadel activities on 150 of the previous 213 publishing days.

He also pointed out two-way barbs between artist, impresario and critic are part of theatre tradition.

Two months earlier, Citadel founder and executive producer Joseph (Broadway Joe) Shoctor, with whom Ashwell had a stormy relationship, circulated a memo to the theatre’s department heads, expressing concern “about the leaking of information concerning the play lineup for the (1981-82) season.”

Ashwell, who had been reviewing Citadel productions for seven years, acknowledged that his “job of reporting on the Citadel’s plans ahead of the theatre’s carefully calculated campaigns had needled the management there. But do they really imagine I should simply sit at my desk waiting for them to tell me what to write and when to write it?”

Several days later, the dramatic dust-up turned campy for a photo, with Fipke pretending to shoot Ashwell, who bled fake blood.

The next day it was business as usual with Ashwell reviewing the Citadel’s production of The Catholics, based on the novella by Brian Moore, and finding that “It doesn’t work.

“And it doesn’t work simply because … so help me, the monks of this obscure Catholic outpost … did, for the main part, remind me of Disney’s (seven) dwarfs.”

Ashwell continued as the Journal’s drama critic until September 1985 when current reviewer Liz Nicholls took over.

Ashwell was “reassigned” to the news department. “To the best of my knowledge, the move wasn’t engineered by Joe Shoctor,” he wrote in his final column.

Ashwell started at the paper as an agricultural reporter in 1967, shortly after emigrating to Canada from England, eventually moving into the entertainment department. After leaving the Journal, he worked with various performing and visual arts magazines and the Edmonton Examiner.

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